The contrast between boy and girl was striking, but not pitiful.  There was too much strength in the boy for that, waif that he was of the generations of Shpack, Spike O’Brien, and Bonner.  In his features, clean cut as a cameo and almost classic in their severity, there were the power and achievement of his father, and his grandfather, and the one known as the Big Fat, who was captured by the Sea people and escaped to Kamchatka.

Neil Bonner fought his emotion down, swallowed it down, and choked over it, though his face smiled with good-humour and the joy with which one meets a friend.

“Your boy, eh, Jees Uck?” he said.  And then turning to Kitty:  “Handsome fellow!  He’ll do something with those two hands of his in this our world.”

Kitty nodded concurrence.  “What is your name?” she asked.

The young savage flashed his quick eyes upon her and dwelt over her for a space, seeking out, as it were, the motive beneath the question.

“Neil,” he answered deliberately when the scrutiny had satisfied him.

“Injun talk,” Jees Uck interposed, glibly manufacturing languages on the spur of the moment.  “Him Injun talk, nee-al all the same ‘cracker.’  Him baby, him like cracker; him cry for cracker.  Him say, ’Nee-al, nee-al,’ all time him say, ‘Nee-al.’  Then I say that um name.  So um name all time Nee-al.”

Never did sound more blessed fall upon Neil Bonner’s ear than that lie from Jees Uck’s lips.  It was the cue, and he knew there was reason for Kitty’s untroubled brow.

“And his father?” Kitty asked.  “He must be a fine man.”

“Oo-a, yes,” was the reply.  “Um father fine man.  Sure!”

“Did you know him, Neil?” queried Kitty.

“Know him?  Most intimately,” Neil answered, and harked back to dreary Twenty Mile and the man alone in the silence with his thoughts.

And here might well end the story of Jees Uck but for the crown she put upon her renunciation.  When she returned to the North to dwell in her grand log-house, John Thompson found that the P. C. Company could make a shift somehow to carry on its business without his aid.  Also, the new agent and the succeeding agents received instructions that the woman Jees Uck should be given whatsoever goods and grub she desired, in whatsoever quantities she ordered, and that no charge should be placed upon the books.  Further, the Company paid yearly to the woman Jees Uck a pension of five thousand dollars.

When he had attained suitable age, Father Champreau laid hands upon the boy, and the time was not long when Jees Uck received letters regularly from the Jesuit college in Maryland.  Later on these letters came from Italy, and still later from France.  And in the end there returned to Alaska one Father Neil, a man mighty for good in the land, who loved his mother and who ultimately went into a wider field and rose to high authority in the order.